


A Judge Of Character In Braille

by somniferumKore (soglideaway)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Flarp, Implied Torture, Pre-Canon, Quadrant Confusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-26
Updated: 2012-10-26
Packaged: 2017-11-17 02:47:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/546813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soglideaway/pseuds/somniferumKore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She may have spent days sleeping over at Aradia’s hive in cheap sopor. She may have learnt to plait Aradia’s hair around her horns and where on Aradia’s neck she liked to be kissed. As a Seer it was impossible to resist what ifs, but they were futile now. She had not kissed Aradia. She had never been Aradia’s sister.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Judge Of Character In Braille

_And you knew what would happen next. The snake_  
 _ready to strike, the bullet finding a body. Night._  
 _The taste of cherry._  
 _This is the astral plane,_  
  
 _this is the spirit world, she says and draws_  
 _a heart on the dirt floor with her finger. -_   **John Adams**

 

 

Terezi Pyrope’s first kiss was a memory left lifeless on an obliterated planet. She did not make an effort to remember it, but it found her anyway, so far from home. It navigated the meteors and the monsters and it found her, small and guilty, with her head in an alien’s lap. The red of his clothing shrouded her, encompassing as the sun had been on her retinas. After all that had happened, a closed mouth now was a sanctuary. She tried to remember something else, tried to remember Aradia.

Aradia, before she had died, had been short. She had been short and she had weighed too little but that had always gone over Terezi’s head. When she had been 5 sweeps old Aradia had just been scrawny. Before she had died she had had dimples in her cheeks and hair with tips sharp with dried mud. Her claws had been dirty, too. Aradia wore the dirt like a trophy. Sometimes Terezi had joined her in the ground, and watched her friend uncover the cracked crockery of generations past, animal skulls inscribed in Old Alternian. Terezi would lie in the dirt and ask Aradia what she could tell from what she found. Aradia would turn and pile rubble into Terezi’s lap and point out that the species of animal was one no longer found in these parts, that they’d been hunted to extinction. She said that there was reference to an extinct hemocaste in the text.

If they were lucky they might find troll bones. Aradia would look at the horns for a familiar shape. Failing that she would look for their hemosymbol, scratched, historically, into the femur. And failing that she would measure each component and judge its age and its diet and, if she could, its blood colour. Terezi admired the order of her work. She admired her extensive knowledge of the dead. She didn’t understand, however, how she seemed to know exactly what she was looking for even before she had found it. But when she asked Aradia she would show her the multiple indentations on the vertebrae of a recent find and describe ancient execution methods of an Alternia still bound by the sky: drones, in communal hives, would sometimes be incubated for a longer period and develop into larger and more aggressive trolls. These would then be used to execute miscreants. Here is a skull: you will notice that it looks remarkably like an ancestor of his Honorable Tyranny. And Terezi would be fascinated and satisfied.

When Aradia came to Terezi’s hive, Terezi would teach her Alternian legal history. Aradia would listen attentively. She was smart, smart as Terezi. As much as she tried to stop the thought before she thought it, she was born several hues too low. She had a blueblood’s brain. When she thought it, Terezi would bite her tongue. She was a maroonblood, and it was obvious in her kindness. No highblood would live long with a temperament like Aradia’s, but, then, lifespan was a different breed of concern in lowbloods.

Had Terezi, aged 6 sweeps and curious, leant across Aradia’s pick axe and placed a hand nervously on her cheek and pecked her, things may have turned out differently. She may have dropped Vriska and her antics, spent more time in Sollux’s hive. She may have abandoned FLARP altogether, and straight-up roleplayed with Nepeta and Tavros. She may have learnt where Legislacerators came from, about how hives had functioned before trolls had come above ground. She may have spent days sleeping over at Aradia’s hive in cheap sopor. She may have learnt to plait Aradia’s hair around her horns and where on Aradia’s neck she liked to be kissed. As a Seer it was impossible to resist what ifs, but they were futile now. She had not kissed Aradia. She had never been Aradia’s sister.

 

***

Her wiggling day had just passed, within the season. Her eyes were still golden and she was on a doubles campaign with her partner, against some indigo playing Emperor. Games like these were for a limited time only and not to be missed. It would be double the ears to Hear the case and double the rectitude.

The crime was treason and so they dealt with him as a traitor, keeping him alive as long as possible in the process. The boy had screamed for his partner so they cut out his tongue. It was a traditional act in his caste. The body was only part of what Vriska did it for. They were both there for the high. Indigoes got it in their heads that they were above the law, but it was worth reminding them that they wouldn’t all end up subjugglators. The kid in their arms was testament to that.

Terezi’s feet were light, even as they trudged the long walk back to Vriska’s. Her bloodpusher still fluttered in her chest, her ribs aching from a blow taken by a club. The boy had had his nose broken for that. She wore his blood down her front like a medal, purple on red. The clash was as abominable as his crimes. Her thinkpan, too, was warm and fuzzy. She’d had to think hard for this one, cite enough laws to justify whatever the hell Vriska had done. It had been awful. It had been delightful. It had been precisely what Terezi could see herself doing for the rest of her life, and for that she had a smile splitting her face from ear to ear.

And, having flung the corpse into Spidermom’s pit, they had run into the hive to eat grubdogs on Vriska’s couch. FLARPING was hard work. As was standard, they decaptchalogued their husktops and signed into Trollian and pissed about online. They’d share especially gruesome links: how to snap someone’s horn with minimal effort, Thresha’s new album, pertinent updates on Alternian law. Vriska would snort derisively and tell Terezi that playing by the rules was for chumps, it’s wasn’t like their victims even knew half the shit Terezi cited. Terezi would retort with a SnuffTube video of ghosts haunting a hive eerily similar to Vriska’s own. On occasion they might have opened up Trolmegle, and invited the others over to laugh at some sap advertising moirallegiance services. They would screencap him shooshing the screen and post it wherever they could, hooting to themselves privately.

But that night, with the indigo blood under Vriska’s claws and in the tips of her hair, Terezi thought of something that had shut her up, and left her hopeful. Vriska looked over, sneering, “What the hell’s up with you? You don’t feel bad about that goon, he was killing lowbloods and dressing up as the Condesce. We did him a favour, the drones wouldn’t have been so kind.”

“Of course not. He was heading straight for the judgment of the Cruellest Bar and that’s exactly what he got. Hell, if they had got him he’d be on the live feed right now. We gave him a bit of privacy when he was wetting himself.” A chuckle squeezed through Terezi’s windpipe.

This was matesprit territory. The blood on their hands and the reckless disregard for even (Terezi shuddered) their own principles, was matesprit territory. She helped Vriska because she pitied her. She was hapless and vicious and lashed out at whatever she could in juvenile anger at her circumstances. What she needed to learn was that it was shit for everyone, but Terezi knew that she did her no favours by justifying her actions. They were unstoppable and Terezi felt them falling into a trap that they wouldn’t get out of. Vriska was the poster-child for a troll in need of a moirail, and all Terezi could offer was a sword beside her or behind her back. If they weren’t in it together then Terezi couldn’t let her be in it at all.

In the next season Vriska would push Tavros off a cliff, in a manner of speaking. Aradia would summon the ghosts of Vriska’s dead, and send them to torment her. Vriska, for this, would add her ghost to the pile. Aradia would never call them anything but Vriska’s, but those dead were Terezi’s, too. Half of them had died with her sword through their chests, and that half was not accounted for.

Terezi knew nothing of the coming season. The girl at her side was her sister in scourge, whatever that meant in the twilight of the coming morning. Vriska’s ablution block beckoned, even if Vriska was unlikely to use it herself for innumerable nights. This wouldn’t stop Terezi making herself at home, but first, shakily, she climbed onto the sofa beside Vriska. Vriska was recounting the details of the indigo’s partner, a bored looking teal blood who had nevertheless been an accomplice in his crimes. They had let her go free, if a little worse for wear.

“And did you see her when we showed her his body? No fucking difference to her, I’ll bet! Coooooooold.” Her voice was soft in the lime-pink light of the moons through the window, her hand draped over the back of the sofa. The blood hadn’t left her cheeks from the bracing walk home, yet. Her hair hung over her face, soft and wispy and messily cut, and she flicked it back over her shoulder to punctuate her sentences whenever a strand wandered in front of her glasses. As she spoke she licked her lips where they had chapped. The skin crackled like dirt in the sun, a blue-black at the tenderest points. She was insufferable, and Terezi had hastily taken her collar in her hand, touching her chin with her thumb, and pulled her close, to shut her up.

Their lips touched, dry and clumsy, sooner than either had expected. They paused a moment in hesitation, and Vriska hissed deep in her sinuses. But for want of a better course of action they went on, their fangs tearing self-consciously at their lips, and tapped against one another. Blood trickled from Terezi’s mouth, along her jaw, settling at her chin to drip into her lap. They did not stop. They threw off their glasses until their faces fit and their lips rubbed at each other wetly and coarsely and Terezi broke off a moment to look Vriska in the eye and say “You are a gross kisser.”

And Vriska had pushed her off and called her a good-for-nothing, quadrant-seeking loser. Terezi had smiled her daggers and, with an arm around Vriska’s waist, kissed her again, slowly. Their teeth did not bite now, their lips moved over each other and tasted cold blood mixing on one another. They thought of the movies which they had watched, of how each kissed was timed. Terezi waited for the moment when Vriska would bring a hand to her hip and open her mouth. Then she would kiss her aggressively, like a kismesis, like whatever the hell she thought they were. She would kiss her all tongue on teeth and moaning mess and would not mean a second of it. The pantomime had played out as Terezi had thought, and she hated herself for wanting Vriska even more. She wanted her to play by the rules. She wanted her sister and all she got was some kid pretending to be something she wasn’t.

Terezi could have stopped her doing awful things, but the awful things were just too much fun. That was the only truth. If justice was a farce then truth was an embarrassment. The truth was that watching her life go down was just too compelling to resist. Their games were all training for a legislacerator and all pandemonium for a loose cannon. She was not what Vriska needed, but she was what she deserved.

They had drawn apart, each of them, for once, saying nothing, and they had hissed a cackle each. Then Vriska had bitten the inside of her cheek and cringed. And then, winking at Vriska, Terezi had left the room. She had cleaned up and changed ready to hurry home in time to miss the sun. And for her trouble Vriska had pretended it had never happened. It would have been wise, thought Terezi in hindsight, to have dressed it up in a pretense of curiosity at the effects of sopor. It probably wouldn’t have made much difference.

Quadrant games were for wigglers and cowards too uncertain to trust themselves to get a bucketmate when the drones came. All they wanted on their hands was blood. As long as Terezi didn’t forget that, they were safe. They had killed as many kids as they needed to and continued to play at a game that they didn’t understand.

Finally, all that time later, Vriska had lain on the floor in a pool of her own blood, just as so many others had before her, and Terezi had been the one who lay her there. This was where it was headed all along. In Alternian, the word for friend is synonymous with enmity. For their folly she could still taste blueberry blast on her lips. It tasted like nostalgia and betrayal. It tasted like quadrants were for fools and they had only ever been two sides of the same coin. Serendipity her ass.

**Author's Note:**

> She never missed a lift, a bump, or line  
> But fingertips will drift and miss blip from time to time.


End file.
